Two years ago at AWS re:Invent, then AWS CEO Andy Jassy made it clear that he was tired of the slow pace of change and he wanted to find ways to get companies to move to the cloud faster. At yesterday’s opening keynote, in fact, new AWS CEO Adam Selipsky stated that the pace is…
South African tech talent marketplace OfferZen is one of the beneficiaries of the growing global demand for tech workers: It confirmed to TechCrunch that it has raised €4.5 million ($5.07 million) in Series A funding from South African investment company Base Capital. This is OfferZen’s first round of funding since Philip Joubert, Malan Joubert and Brett…
Maple VC is based in San Francisco, but don’t let that fool you, says its founder, Andre Charoo. The young fund, which launched in 2016 with $1.2 million in capital commitments, just closed on $16.5 million in capital commitments for a second fund that promises to almost exclusively back savvy Canadian founders, no matter where…
Lee Li is a project manager and B2B copywriter with a decade of experience in the Chinese fintech startup space as a PM for TaoBao, MeitTuan and DouYin (now TikTok). Investment in fintech is surging back following a brief but notable drop during the COVID pandemic. As a result, countries worldwide are seeing a large…
Startups are often questions: What if we did things in a new way, instead of the way we have been? Massive is a good example of the genre: What if users could pay for apps or services not with money or attention, but with their spare compute power? The general concept of distributed compute power…
In a significant push against big tech’s ability to maintain market dominance through sheer buying power, the UK’s competition watchdog has ordered Facebook (now Meta) to reverse its acquisition of animated GIF platform, Giphy — confirming the Financial Times‘ earlier reporting. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said its phase 2 investigation cemented earlier competition…
GajiGesa’s earned wage access feature user flow GajiGesa, a fintech company focused on services for Indonesian workers, announced today that it has raised $6.6 million USD in pre-Series A funding. The round was led by MassMutual Ventures, with participation from January Capital, European earned wage access company Wagestream (EWA is GajiGesa’s flagship feature), Bunda Group,…
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for November 29, 2021! It’s Monday, we’re back, you are back and the news is back. If you had hoped that the post-Thanksgiving, pre-holiday break period…
Japanese tech giant Panasonic has confirmed a data breach after hackers gained access to its internal network. Panasonic said in a press release dated November 26 that its network was “illegally accessed by a third party” on November 11 and that “some data on a file server had been accessed during the intrusion.” However, when…
Thought Machine, a 2014 (Xoogler) founded startup that sells cloud-based b2b banking services, has closed a $200 million Series C round and announced that it’s achieved unicorn status (aka, passing a $1BN valuation). The new funding follows an $83M Series B round last year — when it described its market cap as “increasing healthily”. The…
